Unilever is reorganizing its company around new marketing and distribution channels in the coming years, and that includes a commitment to investing in innovation across its media plan. Read how the CPG brand is allocating that investment, approaching retail media networks and leaning into data-driven offerings, according to a piece in AdExchanger.

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One brand that’s carved out a successful program as an alternative to third-party data is The New York Times. What’s more, the tools that it’s building will support various parts of the company beyond the marketing department. A piece in AdMonsters takes a look at how the Times’ data strategy supports a view of the customer journey from end to end.

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At the height of the pandemic, brands were tasked with adapting business models to fit a new marketplace irreparably altered by lockdowns, social distancing, global economic hardship and elevated health risks. Many that were facing a steep decline in customers took to supporting communities through the crisis with cause marketing initiatives, from offering free products and services to donating funds to converting their facilities to PPE factories.

SmileDirectClub was a company that focused on the latter. Fast forward two years, and it’s learned a thing or two from the experience and invested in pandemic-proof channels popular with its 18- to 35-year-old core customer base—like TikTok. We caught up with SmileDirectClub CMO John Sheldon to discuss the brand’s success with the platform, how marketing has evolved over the pandemic, new data-driven strategies and social media’s advantage within a privacy-focused marketplace.

Chief Marketer: The last time we spoke, we talked about the ways SmileDirectClub was assisting the medical community during the pandemic, such as dedicating a portion of your 3D-printing facility to produce personal protective equipment. But things have evolved over two years, and of late you’ve had some success with TikTok. Can you talk about your strategy there?

John Sheldon, CMO of SmileDirectClub: It’s been a growing channel for us, particularly in a world where some of the other digital channels have become less effective, partly because of iOS 14.5 and above, and some of the privacy pieces. We’re looking for other places to expand our customer base. TikTok has a good chunk of people that are our customer, particularly in that 18- to 35-year-old range. So we’ve been working to spend more and more money there.

What we found is a couple of things. Number one is we’ve done some work with influencers who know how to make content that catches on the platform. By working with those folks in an authentic way, we’re able to expand our presence. All of the people that are representing us on these platforms are customers. They’re people who are actually using the product, whether it’s the whitening product or teeth straightening. Second, we’ve started to build our organic presence there. We have a team member named Emily who’s done a great job of watching some of the key trends that start to catch fire on the platform and, where appropriate, figure out how to insert our brand into the narrative.

And then third, adapting our existing advertising to the platform, and making sure that it mirrors what we’re doing there. We’ve been building a character named Dee Dee, who’s creating us as a challenger brand to Invisalign. Those videos bring people over to our website where we can convert them to being a lead and then ultimately a customer.

@happykelli #ad @SmileDirectClub has got me smiling big #smiledirectpartner ♬ original sound – Kelli

CM: With more options out there today than a few years ago, how do you stay ahead of competitors?

JS: Actually, I would say there’s not a lot more options out there than there were a few years ago. It’s pretty much turned into a two-horse race. Byte is pulling back, we can see that. Candid has basically gotten out of the direct-to-consumer business and only working through Candid Pro now. So it really leaves just us and Invisalign in the teeth straightening business in the U.S. that have any scale whatsoever, which is why we’ve really turned our attention to them.

After building the business for the last nearly eight years, we’re keen that we actually have a better option for most people. We want to make sure folks know that. [Invisalign] did a nice job over 25 years, [but we’re] creating a brand and want to tell people there’s another, and in many cases better, option.

CM: Is your main social media focus just on TikTok?

JS: No, we are on other platforms. We’re on Snapchat; we’re on Facebook. No doubt as other platforms arise, we’ll participate in those environments as well, but those are some of the main ones. We’ve done some work with Pinterest historically. We’re doing a little bit less with them right now, but that doesn’t mean we won’t go back to it in the future.

CM: Are there any lessons learned from your experience with TikTok that might be useful to other brands?

JS: Number one, you can’t just adopt your TV advertising or even some of the things that may work in other digital media platforms and hope that they work. You really need to be engineered for the TikTok environment, which is one that grabs attention quickly, entertains, creates something worth copying, and then allows people to iterate on your brand.

CM: You mentioned you have someone on staff who follows TikTok trends. Is it a similar process with the other social platforms that you use or is that unique to TikTok for you?

JS: We also follow trends on other platforms—although on TikTok, the pace of them turning over is a lot faster. We certainly work to jump on things quickly in that environment.

CM: The last time we spoke, the pandemic had significantly altered your marketing. Can you talk about how things have evolved over the past two years, and how the pandemic has affected your marketing from a business perspective?

JS: Probably the most important way the pandemic’s impacted our business is how consumers are looking to get started. When we originally founded the business, we started with this at-home impression kit, where you can do the impression, send them in and then your doctor will create your treatment plan. What we found was that for a $2,000 product that you’re going to stick in your body, people wanted to talk to somebody. We opened up a lot of SmileShops—almost 300 globally—for people to get started in. In the pandemic, people wanted to go to those less. In fact, for a while we were shut down and couldn’t operate those SmileShops. Our business went from 90 percent shops to 99 percent kits almost overnight.

Since then, we’ve been reopening the shops and it’s balanced back out. We’re about 50/50 as a business today. People are a lot more comfortable with telemedicine and teledentistry as a result of their experiences throughout the pandemic. That’s been really valuable. The other thing it taught us is that there’s a set of people who really want go talk to their dentist. So last year we opened up a SmileDirectClub partner network to enable your local dentist to help you get started with SmileDirectClub treatment. And now we’ve got over 700 locations signed on.

CM: What’s next for the brand? Any new products or innovations coming soon?

JS: We’re in the middle of a pretty exciting product launch right now. Not only are we a challenger brand in the aligner space, but we’re also a challenger brand in the whitening space. Two years ago, when we last talked, we had just launched an oral care line, including our whitening, in Walmart. The whitening took off. We have a huge amount of sales now going through the oral care aisle in Walmart and CVS and 12,500 other locations in North America.

We heard a lot of demand for a strips-like product, so we created one that is better in many ways than the market leader, Crest White Strips. Ours is a dissolvable strip that gets you two times brighter two times faster than Crest White Strips. Those power claims and that ability to take them on as a challenger brand is something we’re really excited about.

CM: Can you talk about some trends that you feel like marketers should be focused on right now for 2022?

JS: The number one piece, particularly as it relates to digital marketing, is about signals. In an environment where Apple and iOS have reduced the amount of signals, finding other ways—third-party ways—of sending signals into the platforms is really important. That’s one big piece. Beyond that, it’s the same things that we’ve been about in marketing forever. Making sure you have a real purposefulness to your brand, and that you communicate that throughout all of your advertising. It allows people to connect with and learn more about the brand.

More than anything through this pandemic, our CRM engine has been the engine of stability. It’s created an incredible ability for us to take leads, which have been a little bit bumpy as we’ve been experiencing the ups and downs of this pandemic, and pulling them through on a consistent basis to get us to aligner sales. Having a really strong underlying CRM capability is powerful and important, particularly for high-consideration products.

CM: Your business is highly data-driven. Are there new, interesting ways that you have been using your data lately?

JS: As it relates to that signals piece I was just talking about, one of the things that we’re doing now is actually scoring customers as they navigate our site and feeding that data back into the different algorithms so that the algorithms know exactly who we’re looking for and what behaviors we’re looking for. We’ve increased the number of behaviors that we’re feeding back into the algorithm to help get a lot smarter and help target a lot more of the right kinds of people for our business.

CM: We have a lot of readers who are on their way to the c-suite, so we’re always looking for advice from CMOs about what they should be focusing on in terms of career development and honing specific skills. What are the attributes and qualities of a marketer who is looking to become a CMO?

JS: To me, it really comes down to three pieces. Number one is you’ve got to listen to your customer, in every possible way. Some of the ways that I do that at SmileDirectClub is I watch, on a weekly basis, videos of visits to our SmileShop to see what that experience really looks like—obviously with the consumer’s permission. Another thing we do: I sit on two hours of phone calls, just listening to customer care calls. And then lastly, our social media listening team is feeding me reports and insights throughout. You need to be able to listen to your customer, take that and then go do something about what you learn.

The second is deep analytical skills. Marketing has become more analytical over the last 20 years, since the dawn of ecommerce. So, making sure that you’re sharp on your analytical skills, knowing what statistical significance means and making sure your team is doing proper test design—all of those elements are crucial. And then lastly, stay creative—amidst all of what I just said, which is much more about observing and analytics. The ability to break through is about doing something interesting and creative. Empowering your creative team to do breakthrough work, to do something distinctive and interesting that’s going to get people’s attention, still matters a lot in marketing. It’s all those things together that can make for a successful upgrade into the CMO seat.

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While the idea of nailing your audience might be basic, we promise this webinar will be anything but that. Devon Watts, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at RollWorks, will cover the following:

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Puri urges marketers to always start with a hypothesis of customer behavior, analyze how the results differ or reflect the hypothesis and adapt various aspects of the test to achieve additional learnings. It’s also recommended to retest original hypotheses in order to account for evolutions in customer behavior.

Second, estimate the business impact of your A/B testing into the financial forecast in order to get buy-in and funding for running experiments. Using a specific framework helps Puri plan, track and benchmark the business impact. Related to that is the third pillar: Set clear KPIs and a measurement framework so that teams are completely on board with what they’re solving for. He recommends integrating marketing leaders with data analytics teams right from the hypothesis stage to ensure that the experiments are accurate and scalable.

The fourth recommendation is maintaining a clear, defined process with specific steps for teams to follow. And lastly, Puri urges organizations to hire diverse talent and build a culture that empowers all team members to participate in decision-making. More detail on Puri’s five pillars in AdExchanger.

Other articles you might enjoy:

• Report: Majority of B2B Marketers to Continue Investment in Data Quality in 2020
• Adobe Summit: Six Digital Marketing Trends Impacting Business in 2020
• How to Effectively Use Marketing Content in the Mid-Funnel

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One way the brand is focusing on that premise is through its recently-wrapped, second annual Million Dollar Challenge campaign, which asks consumers to share their own GoPro footage for a chance to win a share of a $1 million prize pool and have their clips featured in a highlight video. More than 42,000 entries rolled in this year, up from last year’s 25,000. It’s become a treasure trove of content for all of 2020 that the brand can now leverage for earned, owned and paid advertising.

Ballard says the company’s marketing strategy has evolved from focusing chiefly on brand marketing in its early days of growth to educating consumers on the features of its products. People were getting lost in the customer journey, he said, which was something that consumer data and insights unearthed. Read on in AdExchanger for a look at how the brand segments its customers and how data informs its marketing strategy.

Other articles you might enjoy:

• Brands on Fire: Mountain Dew
• 10 CES Takeways for Marketers
• The 10 Best Promotional Marketing Ideas of 2019

The post How GoPro CMO Used Data Insights to Drive Marketing Strategy appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Employing an effective testing strategy can help marketers address both of these challenges. More on that later. First, let’s take a look at zero-based budgeting and its impact on marketers.

Starting from Zero

Traditionally, planning a new budget simply meant looking at revenue and expenditures from the previous accounting period. Zero-based budgeting, according to Investopedia, is an approach in which “all expenses must be justified for each new period. The process of zero-based budgeting starts from a ‘zero base,’ and every function within an organization is analyzed for its needs and costs.”

The advantages of zero-based budgeting from an overall organizational perspective? Long-term growth and a positive balance sheet. From a marketer’s perspective, though, the practice can make life more difficult. In particular, marketers must provide a rationale—and secure executive approval—for every ad and asset in their budget. And before launching a new campaign or trying a new tactic, they must make a convincing case for how it will help the business.

It doesn’t exactly sound like a breeding ground for innovation and creativity, right? Not so fast…

Finding the Right Fit

In the face of tightened budgets and growing marketing complexity, there’s never been a greater need for accurate measurement of marketing efforts. By showing their campaigns are producing a solid ROI, marketers improve their chances of getting the funding they need for the next budget cycle.

There are a number of solutions available to help marketers analyze performance:

• Marketing mix modeling provides insights into the historical performance of each channel so marketers can adjust their budget as necessary.
• Multi-touch attribution highlights how well a specific channel or tactic is working in-market, so adjustments can be made while campaigns are still running.

Both solutions offer measurement across multiple campaigns and programs. They can help answer questions such as, “Where and how much should I invest?” or “How can I optimize the creative or channels of campaigns in flight?”

However, meeting the demands of zero-based budgeting means justifying costs at every step. Success requires embracing a test-and-learn approach.

Other articles you might enjoy:

• Facebook Campaign Budget Optimization: What Marketers Need to Know
• Wayfair, Pandora, Diageo Executives Weigh in on 2020 Marketing Opportunities
• Five Tips from Getting More ROI From Influencers

Where the Answers Lie

Every day, marketers are looking to answer specific questions or support targeted initiatives, such as, “How much did our end-of-summer sale actually move the needle?” “Has our rebranding campaign been a success?” or “How well did our ads targeting boomers perform?”

The key to finding the answers is short-term tests that leverage actual data (e.g. credit and debit sales, store sales, loyalty cards) to gauge impact. Analyzing a particular digital or print ad or a local TV campaign gives you the freedom to scale up if it performs well or to change gears if the results aren’t there.

The first step in conducting a test is to identify a control group of stores (or consumers) that are as similar as possible (in terms of purchasing behavior, demographics, geography, etc.) to the test group of stores (or consumers) that will be exposed to the marketing campaign. Once the marketing campaign is over (a campaign should be at least six weeks long), calculate the impact—i.e. “lift”—based on the differences in performance between the test and control groups.

By measuring lift, marketers can gain sharper insights into which consumer segments and campaign elements are generating the greatest response—and make better-informed decisions in the future.

Acing the “Moment of Truth”

It’s no secret that consumer behavior has changed radically over the past decade. Consumers have become accustomed to omnichannel shopping—and expect the same exceptional experience across all touchpoints, physical and digital.

Before the dawn of the internet, marketers aimed to capture consumers at the “moment of truth,” as defined by Jan Carlzon, then president of Scandinavian Airlines, and author of 1987’s Moments of Truth. “Any time a customer comes into contact with a business, however remote, [the business has] an opportunity to form an impression,” Carlzon said.

A.G. Lafley, then chairman, president, and CEO of Procter & Gamble, expanded on the concept in 2005. He described two moments of truth, the first of which is when the customer is looking at a product, in a store or online, and deciding whether to purchase it.

Fast-forward to 2011, when Google coined the term “zero moment of truth (ZMOT),” which it claimed was “changing the marketing rulebook”:

“It’s a new decision-making moment that takes place a hundred million times a day on mobile phones, laptops and wired devices of all kinds. It’s a moment where marketing happens, where information happens, and where consumers make choices that affect the success and failure of nearly every brand in the world.”

That is, the buyer journey no longer begins when someone sets foot in a store, visits a website, or speaks with a customer service agent over the phone. Rather, it begins when he or she researches a product online prior to making a purchase. As a result, brands have had to divert conversion resources from in-store promotions to digital marketing, online video, TV, and other upper-funnel channels.

Marketers, in turn, are tasked with proving their tactics are persuading consumers to take a desired action at various points in the buyer journey. By measuring incremental lift through short-term tests, they can do just that. Better yet, marketers will know they’re connecting with the right consumers at scale while generating an impressive ROI to help their marketing organization overcome the challenges of zero-based budgeting.

Zhelko Genev is Solutions Consultant Director for Nielsen Marketing Effectiveness

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Data management is increasingly falling within the purview of the modern CMO. But with the advent of CCPA and the consequences felt as a result of GDPR (to say nothing of future potential privacy regulations), the onus is on marketers to protect consumers data while still depending on it. Looking ahead to 2020, a sound data management strategy is critical as the landscape becomes more complex.

According to AdExchanger, companies seeking to develop a complete data strategy should consider a few things. First, businesses should work on formulating data across department silos and orient the strategy around the customer. They should also focus on delivering value in order to build customer trust, embracing new analytics platforms that combine their first-party data with platform-level customer data and building flexible teams that embrace collaboration. Read on for how your business can use these insights to accelerate digital growth in 2020.

Other articles you might enjoy:

• Three Ways Marketing and Technology Can Collaborate on Digital Transformation
• Getting to the C-Suite: How Six CMOs Rose to the Top
• The CMO Reckoning Isn’t a Coincidence

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This imperative is valid: Any CMO who isn’t thinking about data probably won’t be a CMO for much longer. Even so, marketing leaders haven’t received much help.

Part of the problem is this: When those pundits, conferences and publications broach data cultures, the advice is often technology-centric. Technology is undeniably important. Without mobile devices, ubiquitous sensors, cloud platforms and other recent advances, the data boom wouldn’t exist. But most marketers aren’t struggling with data because of technology. The real culprit is culture.

Indeed, “data culture” is just the newest iteration of the quandary Nicholas Carr described in his 2003 Harvard Business Review article, “IT Doesn’t Matter.” Carr argued that because most technologies are eventually commoditized, they offer only short-term competitive advantages. Enduring benefits therefore derive not from tech itself, but from the way a workplace culture utilizes the technology to devise and execute strategies. This was true for word processors and it will be true for data analytics too.

So how can CMOs proceed? Here are six tips to help marketing leaders build data cultures.

1. Embrace employee skepticism.

Purchasing a product doesn’t guarantee your employees will use it— see the BYO phenomenon for all the examples you’ll ever need. Data solutions are no different, and to get buy-in from their teams, CMOs need to set a tone that acknowledges employee concerns.

In a 2013 study conducted by The Economist, for example, EMC CTO William Schmarzo noted that many employees are “reluctant” to embrace decisions made “on the basis of data rather than expertise.” Marketers, being a generally creative and intuitive bunch, are particularly likely to feel this sort of tension.

If you’re a CMO whose workforce faces this anxiety, you won’t build a successful culture by simply ordering your employees to shape up. Rather, you must listen to and validate their concerns, and be prepared to explain why data is an asset to, rather than a destroyer of, creativity. A CMO might explain that whereas data can reveal why consumers are or aren’t buying, it will never be able to replace the human creativity required to turn this information into a persuasive ad, for example.

2. Not all data is created equal.

If data is going to infuse marketers with a sense of cultural purpose, the data has to provide valuable information—which is easier said than done. A recent Deloitte study, for example, found that 82% of CMOs feel uncomfortable interpreting consumer analytics. The reality is, currently marketers’ data methodology is far from ideal.

Marketers who rejoice over retweets and page views are often missing the mark. Social data isn’t valuable on its own; it’s valuable when it includes trends that correlate to the brand’s revenue, as these correlations reveal which topics drive consumer intent and how marketers can tap these topics to improve business outcomes.

CMOs must contextualize why certain metrics are worth tracking. When employees understand the value of a metric and how that metric contributes to business, personal and social goals, the employees are much more likely to coalesce into a data-friendly culture.

3. Invest in training.

Many marketing pundits have blamed data struggles on the job market. “It’s hard to find those people who have a perfect mix of data skills and creative thinking,” they lament.

Get over it. Those “unicorn” candidates will become more common in the future, as data culture becomes more pervasive, but as this article’s first tip suggested, data isn’t about replacing existing employees with a shiny new fleet of data scientists.

To build a data-driven culture, CMOs must invest not only in visualization tools that make analytics accessible to non-technical employees, but also in training that allows marketers to make the most of the new tools. Again, it’s not about the technology—it’s about building a culture that empowers people to use technology.

4. Failure can be a good thing.

Most marketers at major brands already track consumer data. Relatively few are using this data to activate strategies, however. Why? When the data points in unexpected directions, it takes bravery to place a bold bet. No one gets yelled at for following conventional wisdom, after all.

But according to a recent study by MIT and Deloitte, employees will only embrace bold action if company leaders concede that failure is often a prerequisite to success. Data cultures are new and alien to many marketers. Even if the employees are tracking the right metrics and feel a sense of social and professional purpose, they’ll still be hesitant to engage in a new process that might lead to failure. To make data a way of daily life, CMOs must give marketers the freedom to experiment with and learn from data.

5. Marketing can be the cornerstone of a data culture.

Marketers aren’t the only ones under pressure to become more data-driven; virtually all departments within major corporations feel this urgency. But as Deloitte CMO Diana O’Brien has observed, marketing departments can set the tone for the rest of the company.

“Now that customer behaviors and preferences are not only measurable but actionable, the rest of the corporate structure has had to shift towards a more integrated approach or risk disruption and obsolescence,” she wrote in a recent article, noting that data’s rise has been tethered to an increasingly customer-focused world.

Whereas customer-centricism is new to some departments, CMOs have always had this focus, O’Brien continued. “That’s why the customer-centric business imperative is one that falls squarely on the shoulder of the CMOs.”

Joshua Reynolds is head of marketing at Quantifind.

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